The case for a “Customer
Experience Office”
Great customer experience
doesn’t just happen;
Mobile broadband customers are willing to pay more for a good experience. Almost half (47%) of customers in mature markets believe that operators should offer excellent network quality, even if they charge a higher price for it. Meanwhile, almost one-third of customers (29%) in mature markets are willing to pay more for mobile services. These key findings from the Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN) Acquisition & Retention Study 2013 spotlight the importance of a great customer experience, especially as the survey also found that only 24% of mobile customers say they’re completely satisfied with their provider. The findings support many further reports from other industries. American Express found that American consumers are ready to spend on average 13% more with companies providing excellent customer service.
So why don’t all companies focus more on customer experience? The
answer lies partly in the way that many companies are organized, with efficiency and scale being their guiding principles. Many organizations optimize their workflows and their units reflect groupings of related activities, including marketing, sales, operations, production, customer care and so on.
The necessary customer interfaces are then superimposed on top of these units, in order to cater for customers at different points in the lifecycle. The result is often that these organizational silos create disjointed experiences for customers, with many feeling they have fallen through the gaps. Organizations are also unable to spot exceptions adequately or foresee a new opportunity or risk.
These issues are even more challenging in the communications sector, one of the few industries where services are provisioned and billed for in near real-time and where differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult.
Customer experience as the
organization’s cornerstone
4 The case for a “Customer Experience Office”
There is growing discussion in various industries that the best way to ensure a good customer experience is by establishing a horizontal entity NSN calls the Customer Experience Office (CExO). Such an office would manage the creation, execution and monitoring of the customer experience components across the whole organization.
According to Heavy Reading: “For CEM (Customer Experience Management) to succeed, operators need to overcome the political barriers to such a solution. CEM ought to be
the ultimate unifying initiative that spans the business/IT/network chasm that exists in most telcos. Yet telcos report that network functions are unwilling to share sources of customer experience data with other organizational domains, and vice versa.” 1
Some companies are recognizing the value of establishing a CExO office because they increasingly see the customer experience as being as important as other C-level positions like operations, finance and IT.
“A dedicated function needs to look at the experience from a holistic perspective. And one of the roles of a customer experience management function is to gather customer feedback and insights from multiple sources and share it to relevant parties across the organization. But simply doing that would be difficult to achieve from within one of the existing organizational silos, since feedback is rarely shared between them. Even if systematically shared across departments, feedback and insights still need to be viewed and analyzed from a multichannel, cross-departmental perspective.”
Where Does Customer Experience Management Fit in an Organization?
Article published 2nd November 2012.
Source: http://www.customerinput.com/journal/where-does-customer-experience-management-fit-in-an-organization/
The elements of the CExO
The case for a “Customer Experience Office” 5
The NSN vision of the CExO would be a horizontal function within an organization, ideally reporting to the Chief Executive Officer. Its mandate could read something like:
1.Create and articulate the vision and blueprint for a desired customer experience: in much the same way as marketing starts from branding and goes all the way into distribution planning
2.Identify the levers/determinants of customer experience throughout the organization, not just at customer touch-points (causes and not just symptoms)
3.Propose and execute the required changes (product, process,
culture, strategy) throughout the organization that will result in the desired customer experience
4.Monitor a set of outside-in and inside-out Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that include not just customer experience measurement, but also monitoring the internal organizational drivers for this experience against expectations.
Given the scope and complexity of the CExO’s expectations, the personnel leading and working within this unit need to possess in-depth knowledge of the workings of various aspects of business, but above all they need to understand the customers’ minds.
Nikon: A practical example of implementing a CExO
One way to implement a CExO function is to put all other customer connecting departments under one umbrella management – an approach taken by Nikon when it created a customer experience department to coordinate every department having a system that connects with customers. The customer experience department has covered most of the gaps that existed when groups and departments didn’t share customer information. The company has consequently seen an increase in customer rating scores.
Source: http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/feature/Nikon-strives-for-loyalty-with-new-customer-experience-department
The right tools for the task
6 The case for a “Customer Experience Office”
A mobile broadband operator’s CExO function would require precise tools to measure and analyze the customer experience to pinpoint potential problems and take action to resolve them.
NSN CEM on Demand delivers these tools in the form of a portal and range of software content packs that show dashboards giving operators a single view of different areas of their customer base, such as roaming customers or customer care.
The case for a “Customer Experience Office” 7
The end justifies the means
A well-executed customer experience strategy can be a powerful
differentiator for a mobile operator:
• It engenders an intangible and
strong association between customer and organization that can help to eliminate churn
• It can help to improve the insight
into a customer with each passing day
• It enables an organization to
predict and catch opportunities
1. http://www.heavyreading.com/servsoftware/details.asp?sku_id=2732&skuitem_itemid=1344
and pre-empt risks before they arise, because selling to and defending existing customers is easier than acquiring new ones
• It makes Customer Experience
a differentiator that is hard for competitors to replicate. NSN believes that the eventual returns in terms of improved sales and market performance would more than compensate for the investment needed in setting up the CExO office.
Nokia Solutions and Networks P.O. Box 1
FI-02022 Finland Visiting address:
Karaportti 3, ESPOO, Finland Switchboard +358 71 400 4000
Product code C401-00886-B-201311-1-EN
©2013 Nokia Solutions and Networks. All rights reserved. Public
NSN is a trademark of Nokia Solutions and Networks. Nokia is a registered trademark of Nokia Corporation. Other product names mentioned in this document may be trademarks of their respective owners, and they are mentioned for identification purposes only.
